I have MS Office for Mac. I use MSWord every day. It's gotten so glitchy and many of my favorite features have either disappeared or no longer function as they should. Someone told me the best way to correct this problem is to return Word to all it default settings at once by . . . . doing something; I forget what. Doing that will take Word back to the configuration of settings it was originally installed with, but it will wipe out any customized tweaks & tricks I have made over the last several years. I don't really care about that, I want to change many of them anyway, so that is not a concern. What does concern me, however, is my document files. I'm told resetting Word won't effect them in any way, and I'm fairly sure it doesn't (but would welcome expert confirmation of same). Secondly, I can't find any command for resetting the program to its defaults; does anyone know what that command is and where I can find it.

Any and all comments & advice will be greatly appreciated and earn you much merit in the eyes of the Buddha.

Preferences or Settings files can become damaged, causing a variety of problems. Fortunately these files are easy to test, but they change locations and names depending on your version of Word. Procedure

Quit all Office applications.

Navigate to your ~/Library/Preferences/ folder and drag the file(s) listed below to your desktop. Be sure to start from your UserName folder— ~ is shorthand for your user account.

Relaunch Word. The file(s) will be recreated when you do so.

If all is well, trash the old file(s). In the case of the Word Preferences/Settings file, you will have to reset some preferences (and, for versions earlier than Word 2008, the AutoCorrect settings).

If this doesn't help, quit Word again, trash the new files and drag the original files back to where they belong. If using Word 2008, look for leftover preferences from earlier versions (see below). Then see the Troubleshooting Index for other suggestions.

Files to Test

Since the Word Preferences or Settings files are more likely to cause problems in Word than any of the others, we recommend testing those files (the first file on each of the lists above) before any of the others.
Note: ~ indicates your user home account.In Word 2008:
~/Library/Preferences/com.microsoft.Word.plist
~/Library/Preferences/com.microsoft.office.plist
~/Library/Preferences/Microsoft/Office 2008/Office Font Cache (12) [See Font Problems: A Special Case below.]If testing these files in Word 2008 did not fix the problem, then check to see if you have leftover preferences from Word 2004 or earlier versions. The directions for 2004 are directly below—for earlier versions, see #1 on the Word 2008 webpage. In Word 2004:
~/Library/Preferences/Microsoft/com.microsoft.Word.prefs.plist
~/Library/Preferences/Microsoft/com.microsoft.Office.prefs.plist
~/Library/Preferences/Microsoft/Office Font Cache (11) [See Font Problems: A Special Case below.]In Word X:
~/Library/Preferences /Microsoft/Word Settings (10)
~/Library/Preferences /Microsoft/Microsoft Component Preferences
~/Library/Preferences /Microsoft/Microsoft Office Settings (10)
~/Library/Preferences/Microsoft/Carbon Registration Database
~/Library/Preferences/Microsoft/Office Font Cache (10) [See Font Problems: A Special Case below.]